A letter to ...

To have lost each other once could be seen as careless. Indeed it was, literally - there wasn't enough care taken in the process. But for a mother and son to lose each other three times? That's unusual. It takes a rare talent for mutual abandonment.

"Dear Mother"; I forgo that conventional opening for a letter. It's not a phrase that comes easily to me.

The first of the three Losings happened, by many accounts, between your 25th birthday and my fourth. Your firstborn, I must have been dear to you once. Was there a period of bouncing on knees, of ruffling fingers through the blond hair? Probably.

Separated from the unsatisfactory man who was your husband and my father, and living in east Africa in the early 1950s, you decided to send me to your parents in Scotland. They gave me a roof, a routine and made sure I had a satchel for my first day at school.

After three Christmases, my father arrived at the front door. A fresh chapter unrolled. He had custody under the divorce arrangement, and had remarried. His wife became my third mother-figure in seven years, and it was only in my teens that I decided to make head or tail of the first one. You, I mean.

It was "tail of" that I made first. I lied to friends that you had been killed by terrorists in Africa. This attention-grabbing fantasy was eventually dropped and, as a form of resurrection with the help of your parents, I made contact. In 1970, at 21, we met.

For more than a decade we managed, on a tight leash, the obstacle course of belated blood relationship - letters signed "love from", meals at which your husband was often the main source of sociability, and conversations about my children and yours.

The Second Losing was my move. Frustration over a bungled meeting and communication confusion was the rationale, but I suppose an element of revenge was in my mind. We would not see each other again for 14 years.

Eventually, at a gloomy time in my life, I reached out for Mother's apron strings. My appeal was answered and I thank you for that. Over the next two years we inched forward again, to converge in 1996. I believed then that, having retrieved each other twice, there were no more slopes to climb.

And yet we have reached a Third Losing, and this one is permanent.

For many years I have been impressed by the generally perceived power of motherhood to override all other considerations. Parents who concede that, yes, he has burgled, bludgeoned, cheated, murdered, but "he is my son and this is the love that knows no destruction."

In my case, I have neither stolen nor slain. I decided - a step neither momentous nor astonishing, given my track record of unsustainability - to marry person X instead of person Y.

A capital offence? Well, it must have been enough. You chose not to hear my version of events. Over the last four years, I have become accustomed to the "do not disturb" sign on your door, and in the quiet corridor outside I have reached a drab conclusion: my choice of a wife was not the straw that did for the camel. It was not an action taken in my 50s that did for our tenuous mother-son bond. No. Whatever straw was added, the camel was a pantomime horse. We have not had the real deal. This boy has always been a nuisance to you, a reminder of a terribly painful first marriage. I am not burdened with that particular memory.

Blood does matter, I realised with gruesome clarity when my son died just before his 28th birthday. I retain him in my heart and head, and he inhabits many of my dreams, usually as a small boy reaching out. Fortunately, I have two other sons and enjoy the continuity provided by them and by the wife you declined to meet.

But blood is not always thicker than water. You turned 80 this year. My gift was to avoid spoiling the day by posting this letter to you. Instead it goes to a newspaper you never read. It's a neat touch that it should be the Guardian, because guardianship is what you surrendered, one day in a courtroom. Any inclination to mend has vanished. Silence is our mutual last will and testament.Patrick

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